Images

And Imagism

The Magpie’s Shadow by Yvor Winters

We forget these things. We forget them at our peril. But once upon a time, a century ago, Imagism was a school of poetic thought, growing in strength and confidence.

The idea, in common with all manner of modernistic influences, of throwing away so much of what made poetry lyrical, made it sing. Sentence structure, ordinary grammar. Rules about verbs and nouns. All of them dispensed with. Such was the thrill of the great image.

They’re more or less forgotten now, at least by the general public, but it’s poets like Ezra Pound (although we might quibble), H.D. and Peter Aldington who set the tone. H.D. in particular. So many of her works have such dynamism, such power. They are, even now, unequalled.

But I get ahead of myself.

Imagism, as you may well be wondering, is the poetry of the scene, of the tableaux. Imagist poems are sometimes very short — a single sentence, a single clause, a single line. That may seem scanty and diminutive, but the best Imagist poems are masterworks of tension and compression. They have in them great violence, immense terror, beauty, fear, awe, anything that stirs the human heart.

The rock that stands in the tumult of the sea, lashed again and again by terrible, cutting waves. That, you might say, is the fit subject of Imagism.

Although of course, not everything to be written has that same drama.

When William Carlos Williams wrote about the plums in the ice box that he ate, regardless of whether you were saving them for later, he too wrote in images.

These poems, early works by Ynor Winters, fit more into the latter category. They are not dramatic, not physically dramatic, anyway. They are not concrete and embodied and involving great violence and danger.

Instead, what Winters tries to do in these poems — all of them very short, most of them a line or two — is to approach the kind of genius of compression that someone like Pound never could. Ezra pound would write two hundred lines rather than one. Winters is the precise opposite.

Take, for instance, the poem ‘Still Morning,’ which comprises, in its entirety, the phrase ‘Snow air — my fingers curl.’

Or perhaps ‘Winter Echo,’ which reads, ‘Thin air! My mind is gone.’

This is the moment, perhaps, where I say the obvious. You either get it or you don’t. You either think this style, this reducing, has merits, or you believe it is all nonsense.

I too could be a poet, many might say, if five words per poems would do.

I disagree with the tenor of these comments. Not that I am a great advocate of Winters, or at least of this book. This work is fine; it’s acceptable; in places, it is arresting. But it is not the best of the form. I would advocate H.D. as the most accomplished Imagist, although I have not ready the work of everybody.

What I want to defend, here, is the idea of compression being a good in itself and not an evasion.

Poems are, even at epic length, pretty short. The authors of even the largest poems could have written prose fiction at ten times the length, if they had wanted. They could have written essays like Montaigne. They could have done anything except what they did. But they chose verse: in part, because it’s more accommodating of metre and rhyme. In part, because it has conventions that some want to buy into. But in part, at least in part, because there is some point in saying things as precisely and specifically as you can.

And that’s what poetry’s for.

Poetry an exercise in distillation, in getting to the heart of a feeling or an idea. All poems are meant to do this, even if, in practice, they go on and on and on.

This is what Winters is attempting to do: to get to the very heart of something in a single idea, in a stark, isolated image, a solitary tableau. This is a noble goal, if not always requited.

Think of the best songwriting. Often it is a very simple thing. The Beach Boys: ‘Sometimes I feel very sad.’

Many Westerners mock the Japanese haiku tradition, which Imagism might sometimes be compared to, in a way. And those who mock do so on false assumptions. They read inept translations of haiku and decide that all poems of that sort must be trite, plodding, unambitious and without beauty. That haiku is something we set children writing, because they are short and simple.

Haiku as a bored person’s banal daytime activity: once seen, easily and painlessly copied. Poetic painting by numbers.

Of course, this is not true. Haiku can be transcendent and wonderful, as the best of them are. In treating something small with its due care, a brief poem can illuminate very much.

Think of Imagist poetry in the same way. At its best, it’s unbeatable: immense, pithy, profound. This is not the greatest Imagist poetry and it is not Winters’s best work. But I ask, if you are not sold on the idea, to think about what we want from art.

We want pith; we want precision. That’s what we want from our songwriters. We may as well ask for it from, and applaud it in, our poets.